{"id":26712,"date":"2023-11-16T10:32:44","date_gmt":"2023-11-16T15:32:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=26712"},"modified":"2023-11-16T10:32:49","modified_gmt":"2023-11-16T15:32:49","slug":"my-1970s-am-radio-playlist-1974","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/my-1970s-am-radio-playlist-1974\/","title":{"rendered":"My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1974"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: John&amp;apos;s &amp;apos;70s Playlist: 1974\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/playlist\/1l3kPTISlhIz7uXmK5pZXS?si=36PqcqwJQM2sDebmn4YYDQ&#038;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>[Another one of those lists which really deserves at least one addition&#8230; impossible, though, because the artist in question (like Neil Young, previously) has apparently declined participation in the Spotify universe. Damn.]<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">So here&#8217;s the situation as of January 1974: I&#8217;ve been married for about six, seven months; I&#8217;m still casting about for a career, not just, y&#8217;know, a <em>job<\/em>; I&#8217;ve actually gotten fed up with cabdriving (thanks to New Jersey winter weather, thanks to the boneheaded decision-making of a temporary dispatcher); and, in consequence, I&#8217;m now employed at a local hospital as&#8230; a housekeeper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes, a housekeeper: on the staff responsible for preparing hospital rooms for new patients, and, uh, straightening up and sometimes sanitizing rooms recently vacated (for reasons voluntary and otherwise) by patients now gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don&#8217;t remember a lot about that job, other than some of the other folks in the department. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"highlight\">One guy, named Jim, was actually a tattooed ex-con. I remember what he looked like, and I remember one other thing about him: when he prepped a cup of coffee during breaks and lunch, he opened packets of sugar two at a time by tearing them in half over the cup, as his biceps rippled. He looked like he was breaking eggs over a frying pan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8230;but I quickly got out of the hospital-housekeeper frame of mind when lightning struck, in March: I found a teaching job at arguably one of the best public high schools in the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I came into that job to complete the school year begun, and nearly finished, by a teacher who&#8217;d been there for years &#8212; a teacher of English and journalism, and adviser to the school newspaper. The latter, as I understood it (and now remember it, in foggy detail), had been &#8220;the problem&#8221; for him: the paper had run a controversial report on a hot-button topic, like abortion maybe?, and he&#8217;d been insufficiently repentant in the face of public outrage. I wasn&#8217;t expected to resolve that specific dilemma, though &#8212; just to try keeping things on an even keel, to get the students, and the newspaper, through the rest of the year&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of these days I may write in more detail, here, of the whole teaching experience. It will involve some subjects painful, even with 50 years&#8217; hindsight, but also some subjects delightful &#8212; and probably so for the rest of my life. We&#8217;ll have to see about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For now, though, just a few things about my 1974:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>That summer, I stopped shaving and grew a beard and mustache. This is the closest I&#8217;ve ever come to a lifelong grooming\/vanity project; they&#8217;re grayer now, gods know, but they&#8217;re basically they same I&#8217;ve had ever since.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>During the summer, I took up cabdriving again &#8212; same company, but with better weather and dispatchers than I&#8217;d had to deal with six months before. (My boss did not appreciate the bearded look, and kept referring to it as the dirt on my face, haha.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>My wife continued to work full-time as a reporter for a daily local newspaper. Among the fringe experiences this introduced me to: socializing with folks who smoked pot as a matter of course. (She and I never indulged &#8212; I hadn&#8217;t taken so much as a single hit yet &#8212; although I <em>think<\/em> we smoked regular tobacco cigarettes then.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">About the playlist&#8230;<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>All the previous caveats and constraints apply: the sequence is roughly chronological, by release date; I&#8217;ve not discriminated against songs just because they had no (or little) lasting cultural impact; and, thanks to the nature of the music biz back then, the songs were not, strictly speaking, all released between 1\/1\/1974 and 12\/31\/1974. (Release dates span almost exactly a year, from August &#8217;73 to August &#8217;74.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some specific notes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The first signs of disco&#8217;s pressure on popular tastes were starting to appear, or at least becoming hard to ignore. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The one song I wish I could&#8217;ve included: Joni Mitchell&#8217;s &#8220;Help Me,&#8221; from her <em>Court and Spark<\/em> album. That album meant a lot to me that year&#8230; Y&#8217;know what? The heck with it &#8212; here&#8217;s my old, non-Spotify audio player:\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>When I hear tracks like &#8220;Love&#8217;s Theme&#8221; and &#8220;TSOP (The Sounds of Philadelphia),&#8221; deeply ingrained in my memory though they might be, my principal reaction nowadays is along the lines of, <em>What were we <strong>thinking<\/strong>?!?<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>My kid brother has often, to me, expressed his belief that my musical tastes in the early &#8217;70s shaped his. (He was still in high school in 1974.) By this year, though, he&#8217;d begun to repay the favor: without hi influence, Todd Rundgren, Elton John&#8217;s mid-&#8217;70s work, and Steely Dan would likely have been outside my range &#8212; and possibly outside of my <em>reach<\/em>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Marvin Hamlisch&#8217;s version of &#8220;The Entertainer,&#8221; like Perry Como&#8217;s &#8220;It&#8217;s Impossible&#8221; a couple years earlier, is kind of an old-fashioned outlier on the &#8220;Billboard Hot 100&#8221; list for 1974. I think I remember it so strongly because of its strong presence in the soundtrack of <em>The Sting<\/em>: that&#8217;s pretty much the only movie I remember watching in a theater with Missus <a rel=\"tag\" class=\"hashtag u-tag u-category\" href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/tag\/1\/\">#1<\/a>, post-college.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So here&#8217;s the situation as of January 1974: I&#8217;ve been married for about six, seven months; I&#8217;m still casting about for a career, not just, y&#8217;know, a job; I&#8217;ve actually gotten fed up with cabdriving (thanks to New Jersey winter weather, thanks to the boneheaded decision-making of a temporary dispatcher); and, in consequence, I&#8217;m now [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26723,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":false,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,5772,73,74],"tags":[735,3328,3844,5773,5778,5786,5787,5795],"class_list":{"0":"post-26712","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-backwards","8":"category-1970s-am-radio-playlist","9":"category-radio","10":"category-music","11":"tag-personal-history","12":"tag-teaching","13":"tag-the-1970s","14":"tag-playlist","15":"tag-college-daze","16":"tag-married-life","17":"tag-cabdriving","18":"tag-5795","19":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/19704.jpg?fit=1400%2C1400&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-6WQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26712"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26724,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26712\/revisions\/26724"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}